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I actually think WoW does a pretty good job of this. You have the option of using the fast travel systems in place, or manually humping it if you like. And actually, for raiding outside of Raid Finder, you have to travel the old fashioned way. Also, for anyone doing the challenge mode 5 man dungeons, they have to hump it as well.

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I want to investigate and find things. I want to dungeon and get decent loot. I want to lay down on a cot in the woods, sleep, wake up and find the orc who rented me a room upstairs left me a key that leads to a chest in a mountain cave where within I find a rare poison blade. I want to EXPLORE.

What I do not want: To be a level one character that cannot enter a zone because it leads to a level thirty five area and I'll get my arse handed to me the second I pop.

What else I do not want: To get pvp ganked.

What else I do not want: To work really hard to improve my character's hunting skills only to watch all those numbers drop after a maintenance update because someone somewhere who has nothing to do with me convinced the game makers my class, NOT THEIRS, was overpowered.

Scenery is nice immersion. Miles of landscape. Hours of roaming thru grassy fields and over mountain ranges. No copy and paste rocks/trees PLZ. But yeah there needs to be a reason other than I like that kind of thing. A hidden clue, magic mushroom under a rock (only one of it's kind find it no where else), key to an ancient treasure, garden tool from a prehistoric race with strange letters that match other tools that solve a dungeon door entrance to a dragon's active lair, fairy foot print that leads to a locked zone, flock of birds that burst forth only in one spot that if you range kill and later cook you get amazing (not lame) stat boosts, crashed space ship that leads to another world that looks nothing like the game so far, or quicksand that sucks you down but instead of kills you dumps you in an underworld with violent angry white haired black skinned women dressed in gold chains who tie you up and only a sneaky deal with a male of their house gets you free, etc. Shiz, I would make a good mmo.

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Originally posted by ElectricWizard

youre missing the point... immersive gameworlds REWARDS the player for exploration and traveling around with gameplay. If you have a world based on thematic immersion then youre filling the world with interesting events and encounters and lore elements waiting to be discovered... thats FUN. thats meaningful. thats entertaining.

but what entertains you, and bores us to tears - are gameworlds that are just filled with exp and leveling fodder. nothing interesting, just pacman pellets to be eaten and fill your time until max level. once at max level you just queue and instant teleport to the same dungeons or raids or farm areas... over and over and over. so basically what you call meaningful is repetitive content meant for currency grinds. so thats interesting to you.. not to many others.

and youre movie analogy is dumb. maybe youre expecting your MMO to interest you for only 2 hours... Immersion seeking players like ourselves hope for more. much more. Its the journey to us. Its killing the same dragon 1000909090 times to you. BIG DIFFERENCE.

What specific games are you describing though? Because early MMORPGs I tried definitely did not have any semblence of rewarding travel or exploration. Whereas with later MMORPGs they skipped over as much of the repetitive travel as possible (Guild War's "instant travel anywhere you've traveled to before" being my favorite and the ideal.)

Do most modern MMORPGs fall woefully short of WOW's mark when it comes to mob variety in quests and general quest variety? Absolutely. But early MMORPGs were even worse, rewarding an endless grind of the same mob types (who were about as varied as WAR and SWTOR's, which had nearly a complete lack of mob variety.)

Again, I'm just not clear on what ficticious game you're thinking of where travel was reliably entertaining. I don't think it exists, except in games where travel was the core activity of the game like Puzzle Pirates. And in Puzzle Pirates you teleported directly into your group's ship any always skipped past anything which wasn't densely interesting gameplay.

My movie analogy is perfectly suited to any form of entertainment, and all the more important to a game hoping to hold a player's interest for thousands of hours. If you waste the viewer's time they're going to do something else.

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Originally posted by Jacxolope

See- THIS explains the complete difference in ideals as to what makes an mmoRPG.

You want to take the "quest" to destroy the ring. You want to follow the exact path as the fellowship (but only the "action" parts) and have the same experience as a million others before and after you.

I want to veer off the beaten path. Explore Mirkwood. maybe try to find the ruins of the necromancers strronghold.... Hell, maybe I want to "switch sides" and return the ring to it RIGHTFUL owner. Stab gandolf in the back- Or maybe just find the Goblin caves and spend my time exploring the labyrinth.

-Neither way is "right"- You like scripted content that is experienced in the same way for millions (or thousands) of others. I like "open" sandbox content where my adventure and story are unique... I want to discover a cave hardly anyone knows about and find what treasures await. others want the cave on a map with breadcrumbs to follow where no content is "hidden" and there is no reason to explore because to many- They just want action action action.

Which is why I cannot understand why some play RPG's.

But "fun" is in the eye of the beholder. If I want a good deep story I read BOOKs. If I want pretty colors and explosions and leet moves I watch a modern "action film"- I came to MMOs to have a virtual world to forge my desting ..MY DESTINY. Not a "destiny" which everyone else is experiencing as well since its scripted.

EDIT: I also understand why many want scripted content. it requires little imagination and creativity and just points you in the direction to go... It is far more polished and with less "down time". The "AStory" is far more epic (in an open Workld Sandbox we cannot all be the hero and save the world) but IMHO its far better in a single player game. I can be the "hero" who saves the World in a single player RPG since its "my personal experience and World"-

Wrong. Nothing about "never waste the player's time" implies linearity. It just implies you should let the player skip past non-gameplay. Skyrim can be played nonlinearly, yet it lets you skip past uneventful travel.

Modern MMORPGs are just as much videogame RPGs as early RPGs were. Maybe you're confusing videogame RPGs with tabletop RPGs? They're separate genres. Always have been. No worries, it's a common mistake (despite the two experiences being so substantially different.)

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Going from encounter to encounter to encounter means you have no choice and are being led around by the nose.

The encounters come from choices thew fellowship made (was clear in the BOOKS- Not so sure about the movies) but there were decisions. Which path, who joins, etc- Even deciding to go see Tom Bombidile (not in the "movie") or Farmer maggot were part of the plot.

The "Journey" is where YOU make your choices (not have them fed to you) and the encounter is the result of those choices. Absent of the choices you just have encounters with no bearing on YOU. Nothing unique.

EDIT: Again, this is fine if you want to experience the exact same path of the fellowship with zero input- But maybe you would like to try something different? A new strategy? Flying the Giant Eagle right into Mordor, perhaps? The BOOK or MOVIE is just a linear tale- I want choices and options or I will read the book and hear about what they" did.

You're missing the point again. The point is that only interesting things are shown. The point has nothing to do with who's making the choices or how many of them there are.

If someone's entertainment time isn't filled with interesting experiences, they will choose another form of entertainment because the other thing was just wasting their time.

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It's a game with the ability to load into known locations as well as travel to the cities/towns via the carriages as a means to circumvent the traveling on foot aspect of the game.

However, you should be noting how they treat travel in Skyrim. They don't implement much of it themselves, but you should notice Skyrim actually uses one of the mechanics I mentioned, in that it tosses simple random encounters at you while you travel so that walking isn't simply the task of waddling across the world. Coupled with the way minor quests are seeded throughout the place, you are capable of getting plenty of novel experience from opting to travel that you will not experience by circumventing it.

It wasn't that well implemented in the core game, but browsing just the immersion section of the nexus mod site can give you a hint at the fact it's pretty scalable and absolves the case of 'uneventful travel'.

Coupling it with environment mods and you might actually end up just with a good sightseeing experience too.

So sure it's skippable, but it's only if one's taking the approach of culling the locations where events takes place that the lulls actually become an issue.

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero. - Vaarsuvius

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Interesting topic. I dont know exactly how to describe it but yeah, open worlds simply give me a feeling of awe and unknown. The damned WOW rat in a maze system killed MMO worlds for me. GW2 did an ok job with its zones but they still feel closed off. Vanguard, now that was a world to explore!

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You're missing the point again. The point is that only interesting things are shown. The point has nothing to do with who's making the choices or how many of them there are.

If someone's entertainment time isn't filled with interesting experiences, they will choose another form of entertainment because the other thing was just wasting their time.

This is rather the problem that I pointed out and failed to be addressed earlier.

If something is in the game and isn't interesting, why is it uninteresting and is there a solution to making it worthwhile?

Just cutting the parts that aren't good doesn't always absolve the reasons it wasn't good, it just makes for a smaller experience.

If there really was no merit to travel then MMOs would all be lobby games effectively. And honestly that's where most are at present. WoW relies on the group and porting mechanics a lot now, and Neverwinter is entirely about a hub world and bunch of instanced experiences.

Breaking game worlds down makes it easier to isolate a certain kind of user experience people can focus on. Doing so is a problem of it's own though in that it pairs down the merits the game ultimately is even capable of having. They all become one trick ponies more or less.

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero. - Vaarsuvius

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If you want to be the most narrow minded gamer ever maybe. Some of us realize it's better to work for a porsche then to be content with a merry-go-round.

What's narrow minded about wanting my time not to be wasted?

Frodo still made a long journey on foot. He didn't teleport. But we only witnessed the interesting parts of that trip. Our time was not wasted as consumers of entertainment.

A game can be anything, so long as it doesn't waste players' time. That's not particularly close-minded. It can include just about any activity, provided that activity involves a substantial number of interesting choices along the way. Any significant pause in decision-making is just mindless downtime, and if it doesn't serve a direct purpose (like social hubs, which allow players to take a break between dense gameplay sections) should be eradicated, and certainly shouldn't be a required part of the game.

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It's a game with the ability to load into known locations as well as travel to the cities/towns via the carriages as a means to circumvent the traveling on foot aspect of the game.

However, you should be noting how they treat travel in Skyrim. They don't implement much of it themselves, but you should notice Skyrim actually uses one of the mechanics I mentioned, in that it tosses simple random encounters at you while you travel so that walking isn't simply the task of waddling across the world. Coupled with the way minor quests are seeded throughout the place, you are capable of getting plenty of novel experience from opting to travel that you will not experience by circumventing it.

I've noted this several times.

If one only uses fast travel in skyrim then one misses quite a lot of what actually happens.

You dont' see the headless horsemen or the redguards stopping random redguard women to see if they are the woman they are looking for.

You dont' get the chance to release captured prisoners

You don't get much of the dragons or find places to explore/discover.

You don't get to follow that guy with the Ox and see what happens to him. Or find a wandering mercenary who "might" be persuaded to have you finish their quest.

You dont' get to see the imperials and stormcloaks battling it out. Or other random npc's battling.

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Instant gratification players are the cesspool that keeps causing MMO's to fail. Unfortunately developers are just now starting to realize that MMO's were about being virtual worlds and thats why they succeeded and did so well back in the day. Some devs still have their heads up their asses, but some are starting to get the hint at least.

Hopefully EQNext and Star Citizen and games like it will really push the genre back to its roots.

"In the immediate future, we have this one, and then we’ve got another one that is actually going to be – so we’re going to have, what we want to do, is in January, what we’re targeting to do, this may or may not happen, so you can’t hold me to it. But what we’re targeting to do, is have a fun anniversary to the Ilum shenanigans that happened. An alien race might invade, and they might crash into Ilum and there might be some new activities that happen on the planet." ~Gabe Amatangelo

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Think it'll also be worth pondering other aspects of gameplay.

Notably, pacing.

This is closely tied to my last post comment on the scope of experiences a game is capable of offering. The more finite the game's experiences, the more you have to balance the frequency they are delivered lest you burn out the userbase.

This is an effect that's pronounced when the game world itself is contracted. If things aren't shuffled about and the action is interspersed with breaks you're going to find the attrition rate of your game to be kind of high.

A movie has a finite amount of time they hold you for. Within that time they have to define the entirety of their experience, so often it's a race against time to pack in all the detail and information you want. Even then, movies pace themselves between highs and lows of action and activity.

Take for example Pulp Fiction or more or less any Tarantino film. Those movies have a lot of action and activity, and even if it's not an action scene there's frequently something going on to keep the person involved in the progress of the film, right?

Wrong, actually. It's notable that Tarantino has a habit, especially when playing to the pulp side of things, for his characters to actually have a few pretty laid back moments where the characters are effectively just shootin' the shit with one another. Tarantino uses it as a means not only to break moments so that people can be setup for the next, but as a way to just prod about the characters a little bit without doing anything particularly deep.

It's something that helps these kinds of films. Even nonstop rollercoasters have the low points after the rise and fall of action to get people over into the next part.

It's necessary for most humans because it gives them time to breathe and time to process actions. If the game itself has the space and variety to let a player unwind, it's a boon to the game because it means that player isn't passing their bucks to someone else to be doing that.

As it relates to traveling. That's essentially the point of the moments between the action. The ability to say 'Ok I'm done with that for a while, lets take a break and do something else, what's the view from that hill look like?'.

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero. - Vaarsuvius

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But again, that's just an issue of preference. If it was up to me I would eliminate insta-ports for queued instances and still require players to hoof it to the dungeon entrances.

And i would not play a game that requires me to waste 20 min "hoofing" whenever i want to run a instanced.

Oh, why would you want to eliminate what other likes when it does not impact you? You can always hoof to the instance if you want to. Just don't expect me to do that.

Choices are good.

there is no sense in having to "hoof" for 20 minutes. but instances are a waste of space in MMOs, if that is the only thing you are going to do...or rather if instances is all you want, then it is a waste to spend time to bring the rest of the MMO world online at all.

Absolutely. A lot of MMOs are much better game for me, if they take away the world, and replace it with a lobby. Many MMO cities (WOW, NWO,...) are used as nothing but lobby anyway.

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This is rather the problem that I pointed out and failed to be addressed earlier.

If something is in the game and isn't interesting, why is it uninteresting and is there a solution to making it worthwhile?

Just cutting the parts that aren't good doesn't always absolve the reasons it wasn't good, it just makes for a smaller experience.

If there really was no merit to travel then MMOs would all be lobby games effectively. And honestly that's where most are at present. WoW relies on the group and porting mechanics a lot now, and Neverwinter is entirely about a hub world and bunch of instanced experiences.

Breaking game worlds down makes it easier to isolate a certain kind of user experience people can focus on. Doing so is a problem of it's own though in that it pairs down the merits the game ultimately is even capable of having. They all become one trick ponies more or less.

Well certainly if it's easy enough to create a bunch of gameplay to fill in that portion of the game that's a possibility. But just skipping that part of the game is also completely acceptable.

It would require a substantial and powerful (thus costly) system to dynamically create travel events that never became excessively repetitive, and it would still fail to solve the earlier "I'm just trying to meet up with my group mates at the dungeon" problem without the system also constantly serving them events too.

All of which achieves gameplay which is kinda only as good as just skipping straight to the content in the first place.

I mean I think there might be a take on this which works, but it feels like a "tons of extra effort just to achieve partiy" sort of thing.

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Games are not movies. I don't need the game to pace me. If i need a break, i will turn the game off, get up and go get a sandwich.

And slow travel is not pacing, it is unavoidable boring bits that many players don't want. Otherwise, why would players use teleports at all?

Plus, in a movie, even the non-action parts are made (or tried to be made) interesting. Look at the Avengers. The bantering is as much fun as the action. The movie could not have made $1.5B if the film maker show nothing but Tony Stark traveling from point A to B in between fights.

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Originally posted by Vunak23

Instant gratification players are the cesspool that keeps causing MMO's to fail. Unfortunately developers are just now starting to realize that MMO's were about being virtual worlds and thats why they succeeded and did so well back in the day. Some devs still have their heads up their asses, but some are starting to get the hint at least.

Hopefully EQNext and Star Citizen and games like it will really push the genre back to its roots.

Ironically, players who focus on gameplay instead of time-wasting ("instant gratification" players if you will) are the ones who forged the genre into successful gameplay-focused games like WOW. They're the reason the genre even got this big, instead of fizzling out still-born.

If MMOs had retained their classic emptiness, devoid of interesting gameplay, they would have never made much noise.

Doesn't excuse the current rut of mediocrity, but that's mostly designers' fault for not focusing on making the moment-to-moment gameplay in their games amazing.

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Originally posted by Axehilt

Originally posted by Vunak23

Instant gratification players are the cesspool that keeps causing MMO's to fail. Unfortunately developers are just now starting to realize that MMO's were about being virtual worlds and thats why they succeeded and did so well back in the day. Some devs still have their heads up their asses, but some are starting to get the hint at least.

Hopefully EQNext and Star Citizen and games like it will really push the genre back to its roots.

Ironically, players who focus on gameplay instead of time-wasting ("instant gratification" players if you will) are the ones who forged the genre into successful gameplay-focused games like WOW. They're the reason the genre even got this big, instead of fizzling out still-born.

If MMOs had retained their classic emptiness, devoid of interesting gameplay, they would have never made much noise.

Doesn't excuse the current rut of mediocrity, but that's mostly designers' fault for not focusing on making the moment-to-moment gameplay in their games amazing.

If "instant gratification" means reaching max level in weeks, rather than years, bring it on. I fully embrace it.

If "instant gratification" means no more boring travel, and i can jump into a dungeon instantly, bring it on. I fully embrace it.

If "instant gratification" means no more staring at a spell book, and i don't have to find something to do for 10 min in between interesting gameplay, bring it on. I fully embrace it.

"Instance gratification" is great. No wonder the market will point to that direction.

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Well certainly if it's easy enough to create a bunch of gameplay to fill in that portion of the game that's a possibility. But just skipping that part of the game is also completely acceptable.

It would require a substantial and powerful (thus costly) system to dynamically create travel events that never became excessively repetitive, and it would still fail to solve the earlier "I'm just trying to meet up with my group mates at the dungeon" problem without the system also constantly serving them events too.

All of which achieves gameplay which is kinda only as good as just skipping straight to the content in the first place.

I mean I think there might be a take on this which works, but it feels like a "tons of extra effort just to achieve partiy" sort of thing.

You're still stating it as the dungeon/quest everyone is gathering around is the main event.

That's a problem all it's own and where a lot of this present issue is coming from. Hence one of my previous posts.

EDIT: Should clarify since I seem to have though of a post in a different thread. :p

I do not see the way quests are presently built to benefit the concept, and how we approach quests and dungeons is actually a considerable contributing factor to the way games becomes so isolated in it's experiences and the quality of it's content.

The fact that you have so far commented in the manner suggesting the quest and location are of greater importance, it implies that that is a more solid or static element, not something playing with the rest of the game system like I had briefly suggested in my second post.

For example

If we eliminated that element and put the emphasis instead on building narratives via bits of stories that we string together to chronicle events rather than running behind scripted ones, and building the player progress and reward scheme behind collecting these elements, that would take the value out of running canned experiences and help egg people towards the idea that they are actually making them via their play of the game.

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero. - Vaarsuvius